Born in Sài Gòn, Việt Nam in 1970, now living in the US as a claimed and renamed TRA

The greening

Across the street from my house, there was a wheat field. My mind is often drawn to this field because I frequently walked through it, sometimes disappearing for hours. As a young child, I would often play there, digging in the dirt, making mud pies or hunting for crayfish. As I grew older, it became a place of solace where I could go and escape the outside world for a while. In winter, it stretched out, an expanse of black soil rich with the promise of next season's planting. It was in summer, when it was dressed in it's finest greenery that it became a place of safety for me.

I'd run through the chest-high stalks with arms stretched wide gathering memories of summers past. Fuzzy heads of wheat would brush dreams against my open hands as I navigated my way to the center of my haven. It was there, in the heart of plenty where I would flatten out a small place for myself. I'd lie down on a coarse carpet of unripe wheat surrounded by walls of its kin and stare up at my small patch of sky. The earth would whisper to herself as the wind wandered through bringing news of another summer storm. Zephyrs whispered old songs in a language foreign to my ears. Yet it was one I understood as I watched eager heads of grain sway in recognition, painting prayers upon the clouds.

It was a familar dance to an old song. Familiar enough that if I closed my eyes, I could imagine myself into a field of rice oceans away. I could leave uncomfortable truths behind as I drifted on daydreams among the terrestrial blues and greens of the small place I'd claimed for myself. It was a portal away from my own duality where I could make the familiar into something foreign and make the foreign into a place I could call home. I could become a grain of rice that spoke the language of rice in a field of rice so vast that I would disappear.

The voice of my mother often jerked me back to reality as she called out my wheat-name wondering where I'd gone. She never asked why I spent so much time wandering around that field. I don't think she would have understood even if I'd had the words to explain. She was a wheat-woman who only ate rice when she went to Chinese restaurants. What would the daydreams of a rice-paddy girl mean to her, if anything at all?

When the field eased itself into the yellow-gold of fruition, I knew the combines would soon come to gather another season's daily bread. Harvest was a sad time for me as the farmers cropped the ripe stalks of wheat and all my childish reveries along with it. Their year's labor complete, nothing but de-glorified stubble remained. The field looked like a shorn-headed boy after his first haircut. That too, would soon be covered over as plows turned the ground inside out in preparation for another season's planting. Evidence of the previous year's labor would be erased and replaced by the hope that nature would keep her promise of renewal.

With the arrival of Autumn, my dreams would enter their own fallow season. This was a time for school, the three R's, pencils and paper. Halloween, Christmas and my pretend birthday were fast approaching bringing with it masks and sugar highs, trees with twinkling lights, presents and cake. There would be no room for longing, no time to think about anything except for what already was, as it was.

The greening would come again, as it always did after the dropping of seed and rain. Soil as black as a thousand concentrated, long winter nights would open itself and become an ocean of emerald paintbrushes. Swaying, they'd render visions of places strangely familiar and hopelessly unreachable from seeds of longing left over from the previous year. I'd again run with arms extended and hands wide open collecting dreams of terraced rice fields and mist-covered mountains as they glistened on course, fuzzy heads of wheat like drops of morning dew.

Rhonda, you know I didn’t think about all the snakes, spiders and rodents that lived in those fields until after I grew up. Thinking back on it, it’s a wonder we weren’t bitten by something. I’m such a city-girl now.

vnbya, it took me a second to figure out who you were. Thanks and nice to hear from you. 😉

There is something so beautiful about fields of tall grass or wheat – and something so inexpressibly evocative about rice fields, even to me who could never have grown with them. Whenever I see rice fields – in movies, in pictures and in real life when I was in VN & Thailand – an unknown something makes my heart leap and drop, in joy and grief.

Rhonda, you know I didn’t think about all the snakes, spiders and rodents that lived in those fields until after I grew up. Thinking back on it, it’s a wonder we weren’t bitten by something. I’m such a city-girl now.

I never thought of it either – and lived in an area prone to rattlesnakes. I do remember coming into the house and my adoptive mother having a fit about ticks though.